The Hike Safe card

Vexed by the high cost of search and rescue, the state is looking to regain some lost revenue. Part of the formula is to bill some of those rescued. Recently a Michigan hiker was ruled “negligent” by a Concord court and ordered to repay the state over $9,000 for a 2012 mountain-side evacuation he required due to a broken hip.

To generate additional revenue and help hikers avoid such high rescue costs, the Granite State is mulling over a “Hike Safe” card. The deal for hikers would be: fork over $25 for a “Hike Safe” card and you avoid having to pay to pay for a rescue should you ever need one. It’s kind of an insurance card against future search and rescue costs.

It’ll be interesting to see where all this is going. New Hampshire changed their criteria for billing a person from “reckless” to “negligent.” It seems to be on the way to “all.”

4 Responses

I think the concept of charging hikers for the cost of search & rescue is a bad idea. Homeowners aren’t charged for the cost of the fire department responding to a house fire. Motorists aren’t charged for the cost of police and emergency personnel who respond to a vehicular accident. Why should hikers in the backcountry be any different? That said, I DO support the idea of charging backcountry users who are grossly unprepared / negligent / reckless for the cost of a rescue.

As for buying “rescue insurance,” I think the concept is fraught with difficulties. Would it actually encourage reckless behavior (I’ll just call if I get into trouble)? Would it encourage frivolous requests for assistance (after all, I “paid” for the right to be rescued… and could you bring along a cold 6-pack and a pizza)? Would a rescue operation be undertaken if the victim had not purchased the insurance?

Homeowners aren’t charged for the cost of putting out the fire at their property, but in New York every property must be in a fire district and the owner pays property taxes to support a fire company, either as a separate line on the property tax bill or integrated into their municipal property tax. This is not the case elsewhere. There’s an infamous story out of Tennessee about a homeowner who didn’t pay the annual $75 fee for fire protection, and the local fire company stood by watching his house burn as he begged them to put it out.

And likewise, we all pay taxes that support the police, and schools, even if we don’t need police help or have kids in school. It can be argued that we all benefit from these services, as they support our society. A coworker of mine used to say that if we don’t pay to educate, we’ll pay to incarcerate.

I agree that the Hike Safe card isn’t the best way to address the problem of hikers getting themselves into dangerous situations, and requiring expensive rescues that may endanger the rescuers– that’s why I loved Herb’s futuristic imagining of a safer way to extract hikers who need help, its often dangerous to the people going out there, some of whom are volunteers.

And I would think that the hikers who are most likely to need an extraction aren’t going to be any more likely to buy the card, and may be less likely to. I’d buy the card, even though I’m strictly a day hiker and stick to easy terrain, but I’m always afraid of tempting fate.

So what’s a better way of dealing with this? The state could treat it like hunting, and require hikers on state land to have a permit and some education, but that would be seen as a new tax and that wouldn’t be acceptable in our current political climate.

Here is an excerpt from the legal documents surrounding the case. A pretty good case can be (and was) made that the hiker was negligent, and the State of NH paid a fair amount to ‘bring home the Bacon’.

“When Mr. Bacon set off on a five-day, solo hike in the White Mountains on September
16, 2012, he was fifty-nine years old, had undergone four hip surgeries since 2005, had an
artificial left hip that had dislocated five times – including twice during the previous year, had a
bad back, was on over twenty medications for a multitude of ailments, and needed to use two
canes (not walking poles) for support while hiking. He had hiked in the area when he was
younger and, despite his physical infirmities, apparently believed he could still conquer some of
New Hampshire’s highest mountains – the respective 5089 foot and 5260 foot summits of Mt.
Lincoln and Mt. Lafayette – even in the stormy weather that had been forecast days in advance.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Mr. Bacon negligently exceeded his physical abilities
under the circumstances. He made it only about halfway before dislocating his hip, necessitating
a challenging rescue in horrible weather conditions that required approximately fifty Fish and
Game Department personnel and volunteers during afternoon and evening of September 18 and
into the early morning hours of September 19, 2013.

Yup, I’d fine the guy or sue to recover the costs of the rescue. I agree the case of Mr. Bacon seems to meet the criteria of recklessness, based on the excerpt above.

The case is also a good illustration of why a $25 rescue insurance card is a bad idea. Such a card might give a guy like Bacon the idea that he’s justified in undertaking such a foolish endeavor: he has purchased the card, so he’s covered.

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